The History Book Club discussion

This is the thread to discuss Affirmative Action.

The Pursuit of Fairness: A History of Affirmative Action

by Terry H. Anderson (no photo)

Synopsis:

Affirmative action strikes at the heart of deeply held beliefs about employment and education, about fairness, and about the troubled history of race relations in America. Published on the 50th anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education this is the only book available that gives readers a balanced, non-polemical, and lucid account of this highly contentious issue.

Beginning with the roots of affirmative action, Anderson describes African-American demands for employment in the defense industry--spearheaded by A. Philip Randolph's threatened March on Washington in July 1941--and the desegregation of the armed forces after World War II. He investigates President Kennedy's historic 1961 executive order that introduced the term "affirmative action" during the early years of the civil rights movement and he examines President Johnson's attempts to gain equal opportunities for African Americans. He describes President Nixon's expansion of affirmative action with the Philadelphia Plan--which the Supreme Court upheld--along with President Carter's introduction of "set asides" for minority businesses and the Bakke ruling which allowed the use of race as one factor in college admissions. By the early 1980s many citizens were becoming alarmed by affirmative action, and that feeling was exemplified by the Reagan administration's backlash, which resulted in the demise and revision of affirmative action during the Clinton years. He concludes with a look at the University of Michigan cases of 2003, the current status of the policy, and its impact. Throughout, the author weighs each side of every issue--often finding merit in both arguments--resulting in an eminently fair account of one of America's most heated debates.

A colorful history that brings to life the politicians, legal minds, and ordinary people who have fought for or against affirmative action, The Pursuit of Fairness helps clear the air and calm the emotions, as it illuminates a difficult and critically important issue.

Mismatch: How Affirmative Action Hurts Students It's Intended to Help, and Why Universities Won't Admit It

by Richard H. Sander (no photo)

Synopsis:

Affirmative action in higher education started in the late 1960s as a noble effort to jump-start racial integration in American society and create the conditions for genuine equal opportunity. Forty years later, it has evolved into a swampland of posturing, concealment, pork-barrel set-asides, and—worst of all—a preferences system so blind to its own shortcomings that it ends up hurting the very minorities educators set out to help.

Over the past several years, economist, law professor and civil rights activist Richard Sander has led a national consortium of more than two dozen nonpartisan scholars to study the operation and effects of preferences in higher education. In Mismatch, he and journalist Stuart Taylor present a rich and data-driven picture of the way affirmative action works (and doesn’t work) in this setting.

Though their liberal leanings would indicate support for race-based policies, Sander and Taylor argue that the research shows that affirmative action does not in fact help minorities. Racial preferences in higher education put a great many students in educational settings where they have no hope of competing—a phenomenon that they call “mismatch.” American law schools provide a particularly vivid illustration of how “mismatch” harms the educations and careers of many minority students. Compelling evidence shows that racial preferences double the rate at which black students fail bar exams and may well in the end reduce, rather than increase, the aggregate number of black lawyers.

Moreover, because preferences are targeted at upper-middle class minorities, they help shut low-income students of all races out of much of higher education. If you’re black and poor—or white and poor, for that matter—your chances of stepping into the halls of some of the nation’s most elite institutions are no greater than they were in the 1960s. Unfortunately, the academic establishment is only committed to symbolic change, and it will undermine any research that contests its reflexive political correctness and challenges its sacred cows. Sander and Taylor argue that university leaders and much of America’s elite have become so deeply committed to an ideology of racial preferences, and so distrustful of broader American public opinion on these issues, that they have widely embraced regimes that ignore the law, hide data, and put out systematic misinformation on their own racial policies.

Sander and Taylor conclude by looking at data on how to level the racial playing field in higher education. Existing studies, they argue, suggest that early childhood interventions are much more likely to produce success down the line.

(From Amazon.com)

High-Impact Human Capital Strategy: Addressing the 12 Major Challenges Today's Organizations Face

by Jack Phillips (no photo)

Synopsis:

Traditionally, human resources has focused on recruiting good people, preparing them for assignments, motivating them to perform, and retaining them. These functions remain essential, but to be successful in turbulent times like ours, human capital strategy needs to be broader and much more far-reaching.

High-Impact Human Capital Strategy examines 12 critical forces that must be considered: globalization, changes in workforce demographics, skill shortages and mismatches in labor markets, environmental matters, and more. It shows how to in corporate each into an effective overall plan, and how to translate that plan into action. You'll learn to design human capital programs that:

• Connect with business measures • Achieve positive ROI • Ensure critical talent is in place • Boost engagement • Address work/life balance and other social issues • Reduce the need to outsource

Case studies and step-by-step guidelines help you move beyond hiring-training-benefits functions, to develop human capital strategies that deliver measurable value in the face of ongoing challenges.

For Discrimination: Race, Affirmative Action, and the Law

by Randall Kennedy (no photo)

Synopsis:

In the wake of the Supreme Court's recent decision regarding "Fisher v. University of Texas, " "For Discrimination" is at once the definitive reckoning with one of America's most explosively contentious and divisive issues and a principled work of advocacy for clearly defined justice.

What precisely is affirmative action, and why is it fiercely championed by some and just as fiercely denounced by others? Does it signify a boon or a stigma? Or is it simply reverse discrimination? What are its benefits and costs to American society? What are the exact indicia determining who should or should not be accorded affirmative action? When should affirmative action end, if it must? Randall Kennedy, Harvard Law School professor and author of such critically acclaimed and provocative books as "Race, Crime, and the Law "and the national best-seller "Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word, " gives us a concise, gimlet-eyed, and deeply personal conspectus of the policy, refusing to shy away from the myriad complexities of an issue that continues to bedevil American race relations.

With pellucid reasoning, Kennedy accounts for the slipperiness of the term "affirmative action" as it has been appropriated by ideologues of every stripe; delves into the complex and surprising legal history of the policy; coolly analyzes key arguments pro and con advanced by the left and right, including the so-called color-blind, race-neutral challenge; critiques the impact of Supreme Court decisions on higher education; and ponders the future of affirmative action.

Living with Moral Disagreement: The Enduring Controversy about Affirmative Action

Upcoming Book
Release Date March 28, 2016

by Michele S. Moses (no photo)

Synopsis:

How to handle affirmative action is one of the most intractable policy problems of our era, touching on controversial issues such as race-consciousness and social justice. Much has been written both for and against affirmative action policies—especially within the realm of educational opportunity. In this book, philosopher Michele S. Moses offers a crucial new pathway for thinking about the debate surrounding educational affirmative action, one that holds up the debate itself as an important emblem of the democratic process.

Central to Moses’s analysis is the argument that we need to understand disagreements about affirmative action as inherently moral, products of conflicts between deeply held beliefs that shape differing opinions on what justice requires of education policy. As she shows, differing opinions on affirmative action result from different conceptual values, for instance, between being treated equally and being treated as an equal or between seeing race-consciousness as a pernicious political force or as a necessary variable in political equality. As Moses shows, although moral disagreements about race-conscious policies and similar issues are often seen as symptoms of dysfunctional politics, they in fact create rich opportunities for discussions about diversity that nourish democratic thought and life.

Thank you Francie for all of the adds on your threads

When Affirmative Action Was White: An Untold History of Racial Inequality in Twentieth-Century America

by Ira Katznelson (no photo)

Synopsis:

In this "penetrating new analysis" (New York Times Book Review) Ira Katznelson fundamentally recasts our understanding of twentieth-century American history and demonstrates that all the key programs passed during the New Deal and Fair Deal era of the 1930s and 1940s were created in a deeply discriminatory manner. Through mechanisms designed by Southern Democrats that specifically excluded maids and farm workers, the gap between blacks and whites actually widened despite postwar prosperity. In the words of noted historian Eric Foner, "Katznelson's incisive book should change the terms of debate about affirmative action, and about the last seventy years of American history."

Affirmative Action for All Our Children: And Why College Education Should Be Free

by Alain F Corcos (no photo)

Synopsis:

American public schools are in deep trouble. They are still characterized by ethnic and class segregation, grossly unequal teaching and learning facilities, and governed by mammoth bureaucracies with a plethora of contradictory policies and goals. For many low and medium income students, college is still not an option due to high tuition rates and poor primary school education. Is there any hope?

Affirmative Action for All Our Children: And Why College Education Should Be Free tackles the hard truth and comes up with a compelling answer to solve all of these problems: the Federal Government should completely take over the education system. According to author Alain Corcos, such a takeover needs to include the federal government financing the entire education system from preschool to college, training teachers and paying their salaries, building and maintaining school facilities, developing the best curriculum to prepare all children to face today's world, and providing tuition-free college for students willing to give back by serving their nation in some capacity for two years between the ages of eighteen and twenty.

Affirmative Action for All Our Children: And Why College Education Should Be Free lays out a detailed plan that paves the way for US public schools to become the best in the world. However, time is of the essence because any change will take at least two generations to affect the nation.

by Stephen L. Carter

Synopsis:

In a climate where whites who criticize affirmative action risk being termed racist and blacks who do the same risk charges of treason and self hatred, a frank and open discussion of racial preference is difficult to achieve. But, in the first book on racial preference written from personal experience, Reflections of an Affirmative Action Baby, Stephen L. Carter, Cromwell Professor of Law at Yale University and self-described beneficiary (and, at times, victim) of affirmative action, does it.Using his own story of success and frustration as “an affirmative action baby” as a point of departure, Carter, who has risen to the top of his profession, provides an incisive analysis of one of the most incendiary topics of our day—as well as an honest critique of the pressures on black professionals and intellectuals to conform to the “politically correct” way of being black. Affirmative action as it is practiced today not only does little to promote racial equality, Carter argues, but also allows the nation to escape rather cheaply from its moral obligation to undo the legacy of slavery. Affirmative action, particularly in hiring often reinforces racist stereotypes by promoting the idea that the black professional cannot aspire to anything more than being “the best black.”Has the time come to abandon these programs? No--but affirmative action must return to its simpler roots, Carter argues: to provide educational opportunities for those who might not otherwise have them. Then the beneficiaries should demand to be held to the same standards as anyone else.

Thank you Lorna

How Trump became 'the white affirmative action president'

By JOHN BLAKE January 9, 2018

(CNN) When the Trump administration recently signaled that it was going to crack down on affirmative action, some critics responded with an odd request:

Why not start with the man sitting in the Oval Office?
President Donald Trump embodies the worst stereotypes conservatives have invoked to describe affirmative action beneficiaries, according to several commentators, political scientists and diversity experts. They say he's entitled, unqualified and held to lower standards because of racial grievances. They call Trump the nation's first affirmative action president.

"He cannot think his way out of a wet paper bag," says Carol Anderson, historian and author of "White Rage," a winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award.

"He's demonstrated a lack of capacity to understand the bare bones of policy. He didn't go through any of the vetting. His taxes were never really fully revealed," says Anderson. ''He had no true medical exam, but folks let that slide. So this myth about affirmative action being about unqualified black and brown folks getting something they don't deserve -- that's Donald Trump."
That's not, however, how Trump defenders see him. They say a corrupt political system needs a disrupter-in-chief. Trump may be raw, but at least he's authentic. And it's not white privilege but "Trump privilege" -- the public persona he cultivated before the Oval Office -- that causes people to hold the President to different standards.

Which group is right? As Trump's first year in office comes to an end, here are three ways he became an affirmative action president, critics say.

Parallel 1: Americans lowered their Oval Office admission standards

White supremacy, sexism and Muslim bigotry -- that's the toxic trifecta that put Trump into office, some say.


President Trump plays in a fire truck as the media looks on. Critics say Americans have lowered their presidential standards since Trump took office.

But others say there's a fourth factor that gave birth to President Trump: hypocrisy.

Conservatives have lectured women and people of color for years about the importance of meeting high standards. No "handouts" or "set-asides" allowed. Only the most qualified should get the job.

And then millions of these same people voted for a man some critics call the most unqualified president in American history. Trump is the only American president who came into office with no military or political experience.

Sometimes, they say, it shows.

This fall, Trump incorrectly stated that a stock market rally could reduce the national debt. He once said he admired "Article 12" in the Constitution (there are only seven). He also said that Andrew Jackson, the seventh president of the United States, was "really angry" about the Civil War. Jackson died 16 years before the Civil War began.

"It's a position he's utterly unqualified for," says Anderson, a professor of African-American studies at Emory University in Atlanta. "He doesn't think. He doesn't read. He doesn't connect dots."

Nor does he seem to want to, other critics say.

Trump lacks intellectual curiosity, they say. A new book, "Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House," portrays a President who has the attention span of a child and does not like to read. Trump biographer Tim O'Brien once called the President "fundamentally lazy." Trump's secretary of state reportedly said worse: Rex Tillerson didn't directly deny reports he called the President a "moron." (Tillerson's spokeswoman later denied he said it.) Trump responded by challenging Tillerson to an IQ test.

"Trump has had a lifetime — 71 years -- and access to America's finest educational institutions (he's a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School, he never tires of reminding us) to learn things. And yet he doesn't seem to have acquired even the most basic information that a high school student should possess," wrote Max Boot, a senior fellow for the Council on Foreign Relations, in a column in Foreign Policy entitled, "Donald Trump is Proving Too Stupid to Be President."

Trump even has an affirmative action administration, some say.
Affirmative action critics often say such programs violate the American principle of meritocracy: that people can go as far as their talent and ambition can take them. America is not some feudal society where class and wealth determine advancement, they say.

Yet Trump has repeatedly violated the principle of meritocracy by staffing his administration with relatives and others with little expertise in their areas of responsibility, critics say.

Jared Kushner, for example, is one of the most powerful people in Trump's administration. Trump appointed him to be his peace negotiator in the Middle East and tasked him with tackling the opioid crisis as well. Kushner's background: He is Trump's son-in-law and a real estate developer from New York. Betsy DeVos, Trump's secretary of education, was a wealthy Republican donor who never attended public school. And Ben Carson, the secretary of housing and urban development, had no experience in housing policy or working for the government.

"It's odd that Trump's Justice Department is going after affirmative action while Trump is putting all of these people in positions of power and influence who are clearly not qualified for their positions," says John David Skrentny, author of "The Ironies of Affirmative Action." "This is not the meritocracy presidency by any stretch."


Here's why a president's character matters: President Kennedy's cool temperament helped the United States avoid nuclear war during the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Trump, though, is not the first president to staff his Cabinet with relatives or people who didn't have experience in the areas of government they would be overseeing. President John F. Kennedy appointed his brother Robert, a lawyer, to be attorney general. He also appointed Robert McNamara to run the Defense Department though his previous experience was as a Ford executive and CEO.

Many Americans continue to hold Trump to lower standards as he approaches the end of his first year in office, others say.

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by Barbara R. Bergmann (no photo)

Source: CNN

Understanding Affirmative Action: Politics, Discrimination, and the Search for Justice

by J. Edward Kellough (no photo)

Synopsis:

For some time, the United States has been engaged in a national debate over affirmative action policy. A policy that began with the idea of creating a level playing field for minorities has sparked controversy in the workplace, in higher education, and elsewhere. After forty years, the debate still continues and the issues are as complex as ever. While most Americans are familiar with the term, they may not fully understand what affirmative action is and why it has become such a divisive issue.

With this concise and up-to-date introduction, J. Edward Kellough brings together historical, philosophical, and legal analyses to fully inform participants and observers of this debate. Aiming to promote a more thorough knowledge of the issues involved, this book covers the history, legal status, controversies, and impact of affirmative action in both the private and public sectors--and in education as well as employment.

In addition, Kellough shows how the development and implementation of affirmative action policies have been significantly influenced by the nature and operation of our political institutions. Highlighting key landmarks in legislation and court decisions, he explains such concepts as "disparate impact," "diversity management," "strict scrutiny," and "representative bureaucracy." Understanding Affirmative Action probes the rationale for affirmative action, the different arguments against it, and the known impact it has had. Kellough concludes with a consideration of whether or not affirmative action will remain a useful tool for combating discrimination in the years to come.

Not just for students in public administration and public policy, this handy volume will be a valuable resource for public administrators, human resource managers, and ordinary citizens looking for a balanced treatment of a controversial policy.

Inside Affirmative Action: The Executive Order That Transformed America's Workforce

by Karin Williamson Pedrick (no photo)

Synopsis:

Affirmative action is still a reality of the American workplace. How is it that such a controversial Federal program has managed to endure for more than five decades? Inside Affirmative Action addresses this question.

Beyond the usual ideological debate and discussions about the effects of affirmative action for either good or ill upon issues of race and gender in employment, this book recounts and analyzes interviews with people who worked in the program within the government including political appointees. The interviews and their historical context provide understanding and insight into the policies and politics of affirmative action and its role in advancing civil rights in America.

Recent books published on affirmative action address university admissions, but very few of them ever mention Executive Order 11246 or its enforcement by an agency within the Department of Labor - let alone discuss in depth the profound workplace diversity it has created or the employment opportunities it has generated. This book charts that history through the eyes of those who experienced it. Inside Affirmative Action will be of interest to those who study American race relations, policy, history and law.

The college admissions scam opens a new front in the affirmative action debate

By John Blake, CNN

Posted at 1:53 AM ET, Sun March 17, 2019

Link:

The Changing Meaning of Affirmative Action

The past and the future of a long-embattled policy.

By LOUIS MENAND January 13, 2020



Many people take civic pride in racial diversity but would rather not contemplate too closely the means used to achieve it. Illustration by Brian Stauffer

The terrible paradox of the civil-rights movement is that outlawing racial discrimination made it harder to remediate its effects. Once we amended the Constitution and passed laws to protect people of color from being treated differently in ways that were harmful to them, the government had trouble enacting programs that treat people of color differently in ways that might be beneficial. We took race out of the equation only to realize that, if we truly wanted not just equality of opportunity for all Americans but equality of result, we needed to put it back in. Our name for this paradox is affirmative action.

The term was introduced to the Kennedy Administration almost sixty years ago, and its arrival was somewhat haphazard. According to Nicholas Lemann’s history of meritocracy, “The Big Test,” the man who suggested it was an African-American lawyer named Hobart Taylor, Jr. He was a Texan, and when John F. Kennedy was sworn in, in 1961, he dropped in on the inaugural ball for Texans in order to shake hands with the new Vice-President, Lyndon B. Johnson.

They chatted, and Johnson asked him to come by his office. When Taylor showed up, Johnson handed him a draft of what would become Executive Order 10925, setting up the President’s Committee on Equal Employment Opportunity, which Johnson was to chair. Taylor read the draft and said he thought it could use a little work; Johnson asked him to do a rewrite. And that is when Taylor inserted the words “affirmative action.” He liked the phrase, he later said, because of the alliteration (or the assonance).

Taylor needed a flexible phrase because Kennedy’s committee was a bureaucratic entity with a vague mandate meant to signal the Administration’s commitment to fairness in employment. Its purview, like the purview of committees dating back to the Administration of Franklin Roosevelt, was the awarding of federal contracts, and its mandate was to see that companies the federal government did business with did not discriminate on the basis of race. The committee had no real enforcement mechanism, though, so “affirmative action” was intended to communicate to firms that needed to integrate their workforce something like “Don’t just stand there. Do something.” What they were supposed to do, aside from not discriminating, was unspecified.

“Do something” is still one of the meanings of “affirmative action” today. Many firms and educational institutions have affirmative-action or diversity officers. Their job is to insure not only that hiring and promotion are handled in a color-blind manner but that good-faith efforts are made to include racial minorities (and sometimes individuals in other categories, such as women or veterans or disabled persons) in the hiring pool, and, if they are qualified, to attempt to recruit them. In this context, “affirmative” means: demonstrate that you did your best to find and promote members of underrepresented groups. You do not have to give them preferential treatment.

Since the late nineteen-sixties, however, affirmative action has also had a more proactive meaning, as the name of an effort to attain a certain number, or, as it’s called today, “critical mass,” of underrepresented groups in a business or an educational institution by, if necessary, giving applicants from those groups preference over similarly or better qualified whites. This form of affirmative action is usually branded by those who disapprove of it with the dreaded Q-word, “quota.” After 1978, when the Supreme Court declared racial quotas unconstitutional, affirmative-action programs avoided any suggestion of the Q-word. But that is essentially what affirmative action in this second sense entails. You can use terms like “targets” and “goals,” both of which are constitutionally legit, but if you have an idea of the point at which you would attain a critical mass then you have a quota.

Apart from stone-cold racists, everyone is happy, or claims to be happy, with affirmative action in the first sense. And many people are happy, or will say they are, with affirmative action in the second sense so far as the outcome is concerned. Legally, we want the system to be color-blind; we want everyone to have the same rights. But socially we understand that people don’t want their racial or gender identities to be ignored. They want them to be recognized and respected. People take a civic pride in having a racially diverse workplace or educational institution. It’s just that many would rather not contemplate too closely the means used to achieve it.

Of the people who like racial diversity but don’t like affirmative action in the preferential sense, there are two types. One type believes that we can ban all forms of preferential treatment and, so long as we enforce existing laws against discrimination, still achieve equality of result. These people see affirmative action as unfairly penalizing those who are not biased themselves and who have enjoyed no personal benefit from discrimination, and they see it as stigmatizing members of underrepresented groups with the suspicion that they are underqualified for the jobs they hold or the school they attend.

The other type of affirmative-action skeptic is the person who knows that this is wishful thinking but is unable to get his or her head around the idea that the way to end discrimination is by discriminating. The law professor Melvin Urofsky, in “The Affirmative Action Puzzle” (Pantheon), says he is agnostic on the issue, but he would seem to be a person of the second type. He wants racial diversity, and he knows that it is not going to come about on its own very soon, but he thinks that specific goals or targets are at odds with the rights of individuals. That’s why he calls it a puzzle.

The history of affirmative action is woven into the history of American race relations, and the history of American race relations is woven into the history of America. It is the eternal bone in the national throat. So when Urofsky takes us through the history of affirmative action—he starts with Reconstruction, but the story really begins in the nineteen-sixties—he is giving us what amounts to a history of the country from John F. Kennedy to Donald Trump.

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by Melvin I. Urofsky

Source: The New Yorker

Thank you Lorna for your wonderful add.